Johnny English Strikes Again review: Rowan Atkinson's spy short on laughs, long on nostalgia

UpdatedSeptember 18, 2018 — 11.15pmfirst published at 11.45am

JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN ★★ (M) 89 minutes

Like many British comics, Rowan Atkinson has always seemed ill at ease in the movies, at least as a leading man. His squirming and face pulling is not calculated to win sympathy, and his best-known TV characters are born losers: in Blackadder he was a sneering malcontent often under sentence of death, in Mr Bean a gormless cretin regularly outwitted by small children.

Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Strikes Again.

The exception that proves the rule is Atkinson's latter-day alter ego Johnny English, a cross between James Bond and Inspector Clouseau​, who originated in a series of credit card ads before being promoted to the big screen. English is pompous and clueless in the usual Atkinson manner, spending half his time twiddling his thumbs and the other half tripping over them. But somehow he always manages to save the day, justifying the British faith in "muddling through".

No one would call the Johnny English films Atkinson's best work, but they've done well at most box offices, except in the US, which must be why we're getting a third instalment six years after the underwhelming Johnny English Reborn. Moderately amusing at best, Johnny English Strikes Again nonetheless has some curious features that set it apart from its predecessors – and from other recent efforts to bring the tired genre of the spy spoof up to date.

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Olga Kurylenko as Ophelia and Rowan Atkinson as Johnny English.

Directed with little trace of personality by David Kerr, the film underlines rather than disguises the reality that the 63-year-old Atkinson looks in every sense like yesterday's man. When we catch up with English he's retired from the espionage game and reduced to teaching geography at a prep school (or, as he thinks of it, scouting for new spy recruits).

But a chain of unlikely events brings him back into the service of the British government, personified by Emma Thompson as the frazzled, image-conscious prime minister, whose government is threatened by a series of cyber attacks. The running joke is that English is uniquely under-qualified for his new mission, knowing little about the digital realm and caring less.

To be fair, English is no all-out Luddite: on the contrary, he's a bit of a gadget nut, delighted to be given access to exploding Jelly Babies or magnetic boots. But he prefers to confront the world in hands-on fashion, a mixed blessing given he can hardly eat an olive or pour a glass of champagne without wreaking havoc.

Atkinson remains a specialist in close-up slapstick: another sign that his talents are more suited to TV than to cinema. Still, the largest-scale comic set-piece is also the most resonant: English dons a virtual reality helmet and immediately confuses the illusion with the real world, stumbling through a London shopping strip and battling the bystanders he mistakes for foes.

In a sense, this is business as usual for the character, an unworldly dimwit who insists on imagining himself as a master spy. Pursuing their investigation in Europe, English and his fawning sidekick Bough (Ben Miller) bear a family resemblance to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in the later seasons of their BBC sitcom The Trip, a couple of ageing tourists idly imitating the British legends of yesteryear.

Naturally, this nostalgia for national glory will mean nothing to the children who appear to be a central target audience (there's none of the bloody violence played for laughs in comparable recent Hollywood productions such as The Spy Who Dumped Me). But the film also has another set of viewers in mind, those who remember Atkinson from the 1980s and who may be gratified to see him return as a grotesque yet genuine representative of old-fashioned British pluck.

Screenwriter William Davies has to tread carefully, not pushing the implicit conservatism too far: English is sceptical about women in the military, for instance, but eventually learns to move with the times. Still, the film does allow a certain amount of anti-American satire, aimed especially at a youthfully smarmy Silicon Valley billionaire (Jake Lacy). Worth noting is the sympathetic treatment of a character who proves to be working for the Russians – confirming that the filmmakers aren't particularly looking to score a hit in the US.